A lecture at The Baltimore Museum of Art, on May 18, 1967, by John Richardson, U.S. Representative for Christie's. Richardson presented an illustrated lecture relating the changes in Picasso's style and conception of portraiture to the changing circumstances of his life.

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Presenter: He has lived and worked as a writer on art all over Europe, traveled a great deal in the United States and at least for the moment has settled in New York as American Representative of Christie's of London. The oldest and one of the most famous art auction houses in the world. Christie's dates back to the 18th century but not John Richardson. Although he knows a great deal about the art of the past, he prefers to stay right in the 20th century. He is the author of an important book on money but his main interest has been focused on the great masters of our century the pioneers of the art of today. He wrote a book on Braque whom he knew well and whom formulated in conversations with Mr. Richardson, his credo on art and painting, permitting Richardson to publish it. As a scholar of Picasso's work and a friend of Picasso, he has been able to understand and to convey some of the essence of the art of the greatest of 20th century masters. Unlike quite a few others writers on Picasso he has never fallen into over interpretations of his works but has succeeded in expressing the humanity and vitality which perhaps are at least for me personally, their greatest qualities. I do not recount the articles Mr. Richardson has written nor the exhibitions he has assembled at the Tate in London, in Canada, in Germany but I do have to mention two shows which he organized a few years ago in New York at which some of you probably have seen and admired as I have. One was the famous retrospective, Picasso, an American Tribute, the other, Braque an American tribute. Both were artistic landmarks and gave the visitor a comprehension of the scope and quality of the (inaudible 02:52) of these artists. So two excellent publications which accompanies exhibitions, they are also authored by Mr. Richardson.
If you read his essay in which he relates Picasso's responses to this exhibition project, you see the man and artist before you and you really get an inkling of Picasso's relation to his own work. Picasso himself once wrote about the painter and his work. We give to form and color all their individual significance as far as we can see it. In our subjects, we keep the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected our subject itself must be a source of interest. May I add that whenever the subject was a portrait it was such a source of interest for Picasso. Nobody knows this better than John Richardson, who has been making a thorough study of this theme, soon to come out in book form. Tonight he will give us a foretaste of it, on Picasso's drawings, Mr. Richardson.
John Richardson: Portraiture is said to be a dead or dying art but we should never forget that in Picasso we have the most varied, prolific and inventive portraitist in the whole history of art and his subjects include many of the more interesting and gifted figures of our time; (inaudible 05:16) Braque, Andre Breton, Cocteau, Derain, De Aguila (inaudible 05:20) Massey, the late Pope John, Arthur Rubinstein, Sati, we could go on forever; Stalin, Gertrude Steins, Stravinsky and Paul Valerie and these are a just a few of the hundreds of people he's portrayed. And portrayed because he chose to not because they asked him or were prepared to pay. I think a lone amount of portraitists; Picasso has refused all commissions for the last 50 years. More important however, Picasso has taken an aspect of art that has been more exhaustively explored and more systematically debased than any other and he breathes new life into it and in so doing he's revolutionized our whole conception of the genre.
Just as in his Cubist pictures, he made us look at objects in a new way. So in his portraits, his later ones especially, Picasso has jolted us into seeing the human face afresh and instead of using physionomical facts as his point of departure as nearly all previous portrait painters did. Picasso deliberately flouts them. He takes his models apart and he reconstitutes them in a new and more meaningful and expressive way and when he displaces a nose, an eye or a mouth, it's not because he wants to be freakish or caricature but because he knows that this will make us more aware of the eyes existence or to use Picasso's favorite word, of it's reality. For an eye or any other feature out of context is more emphatically itself than an eye correctly placed in an eye socket. And Picasso himself once explained this to Kahnweiler, his dealer, he said people used to say that I put the nose on the wrong way round (inaudible 07:11) but I had to do this so that people should see it was a nose. I was sure that later they would see it was not on the wrong way round and I think he has been proved right, I think all of us today are not worried by this nose anymore.
Now the best introduction to Picasso's portraits is by of his self portraits. Could I have the first slide please? For these reveal many of the rudiments of the artist's curiously questing approach to portraiture and his no less questing approach to himself. Most of the self portraits date from the first 10 years of Picasso's artistic career. That is to say from 1896 when he was 15 until 1906 when he was 25. Ten years which we have to see as a desperate search for style and to some extent for an identity and thus Picasso portrays himself in constantly changing styles as an academic style, art nouveau style, (inaudible 08:08) impressionistic and in the manner of different painters; (inaudible 08:12) and also in constantly changing roles as a romantic vagabond, a top hated dandy, a bearded bohemian, a visionary, a Spanish peasant and a wretched outcast. Some of these (inaudible 08:29) could be hardly less appropriate. For instance, in the picture on the right which was painted at the age of 15 and a picture incidentally which has never left the house of the artist's family in Barcelona, Picasso sees himself a sardonic middle aged aristocrat of the 18th century in a powdered wig and what could be less appropriate for a 15 year old boy to see himself as. And other self portraits of the same date are more literal but most of the time Picasso is either striking a romantic attitude or he's trying on a mask as here on the left, it is a drawing of 1897 to '98 in which he appears as a romantic Jean Pommier (09:14) and is even inscribed the Spanish word Yo meaning I on the drawing as if to convince himself that it really is he and there are other more revealing drawings done a year or two later. There's one particular one in which he's written, Yo el Rey, I the King, three times over, in a curious pathetic attempt to try and aggrandize himself and as Doctor Phoebe Poole has pointed out, Picasso and the young Barcelona artists of the period were great admirers of nature and one of their beliefs was that the century about to dawn would see the emergence of a glorious new art and a coming of a messianic artist (inaudible 09:58) superman, who would have a Dionysiac style and would completely revolutionize the art of its time and I am sure Picasso, who was familiar with nature, who has told me that he read nature, saw himself filling this role and certainly some of the works of the period, the self portraits in particular would seem to confirm this was the case.
Now another aspect of Picasso's proteome personality is revealed in the painting on the right which was done in 1901, when he was 20 and this work which appropriately enough belonged to Hugo Van Hoffmannsthal the writer and librettist. This self portrait presents us with a mature and worldly looking artist, the image of one of the so called Bravora painters, an artist who has been to Paris and equipped himself with an up to date eye catching style. And later the same year Picasso carried his fantasies still further and painted himself as a top hated boulevardier with a carnation in his buttonhole, leering at girls in the street and of course these disguises should not always be taken seriously. Picasso simply wanted to make an ironic comment on his circumstances which were the reverse of elegant and suitably enough, he made them in a style which was halfway between Fois Grand and Ella, who were the fashionable painters at the time. Now, the third self portrait of 1901 is closer to the truth although once again Picasso dramatizes and romanticizes his effect. In the painting on the left it's one of the few works of the blue period that Picasso kept for himself. The artist makes no attempt to disguise the sadness and the poverty of his life he rather makes capital out of them. And here we see the cold and starving painter of romantic fiction, who is so cold indeed that his wretched overcoat we see there was so little protection against the cold that he had to burn a lot of his drawings in order to keep warm. He is rather like that character out of (inaudible 12:08) I mean his whole life at the time reflects that and I think it's curious the way the face is treated like a mask in which the eyes stare out at us in a very self-pitying and I said to my mind, not a particularly attractive way.
More puzzling is the drawing of 1903 on the right, it's the reverse side of a well known drawing in the fog, in which the artist has grafted a self-portrait a somewhat veiled like one out of the body of an adolescent and it's a sketch for the male figure in what is thoroughly Picasso's masterpiece of the blue period, La Vie in Cleveland and it bares out that this mystifying and very personal allegory was at one time intended to revolve around Picasso himself, in the end it was the central that became another painter.
Now what I find fascinating about this characterization is Picasso's ability to step out of his own shoes and see himself as others see him, in this case the eye of an art student confronted with some quite anonymous model. And this uncanny detachment about himself is a feature of many of Picasso's self-portraits of the period, notably a drawing in profile of 1902, inscribed Picasso (inaudible 13:33) Picasso by himself and to this day Picasso often talks of his works as if it were by someone else and in this respect he always makes me think of that very scary line of Rambo (inaudible 13:45) I is another.
Now various peoples have maintained, especially professor Edgar Vint the blue period pictures represent the true Picasso and that all subsequent stylistic changes are simply masks that disguise a basic sentimentality and triviality of content. Now I think it's an ingenious theory but the reverse of a truth for it was above all for the blue period that Picasso was wearing a mask and at subsequent periods there was no dissembling, least of all in the portraits and the style and identity that Picasso had contrived for himself by 1902, might well have contented a lesser artist but for the rest of his life, I think it's characteristic of Picasso that he went slogging along and in the next three years or so became dissatisfied with the youthful posturing and ultimately dismissed his work of the blue period as nothing but sentiment.
In the next two slides, we'll see that the atmosphere has already lightened. On the left in the (inaudible 14:50) in the personal collection in New York, Picasso appears on the right in fancy dress, suitable enough in the guise of a Harlequin and he seems to be enjoying himself as much as he was pitying himself in previous works. And the drawing on the right done a year later, we see Picasso literally as he was at the time and as his mistress Fernande Olivier has described him, a pipe smoking (inaudible 15:18) bohemian, small, (inaudible 15:21) squat, ill at ease, disturbing, negligently dressed, badly groomed and armed with a Browning revolver with which he frightened off people who bored him. And I think that's what he's reaching for in his pocket there. And you note by the way, once again how the artist depicts himself in profile and as others see him and in this strange detachment about himself we see once again. As other see him and also how the (inaudible 15:56) mannerisms, the blue period mannerisms have given way to a more vigorous and a much more mature view of himself.
But Picasso had still not quite found the identity for which he was seeking nor had he found the style which he was looking out for and it wasn't really until 1906 after spending the summer in Ghazal, in the Pyrenees that he finally became a major artistic personality with a style that is personal, revolutionary, forceful and expressive and this new style and his new persona manifest themselves in the great self-portrait which is in the Philadelphia museum on the left painted in the fall of 1906. And gone is all the false romanticism and the youthful disguises and Picasso has finally emerged in his true colors as the rebel leader of modern art and having found himself at last, Picasso no longer found at last, Picasso no longer felt an overpowering need to indulge in self-portraiture except on very isolated occasions when a mistress or a friend wanted some memento of him or because of some very special circumstances. The drawing on the right is a case in point and Picasso whose Atheism doesn't preclude a great deal of Spanish superstition relates that on Armistice Day 1918, he was walking along the (inaudible 17:19) when a war widows veil blew across his face and he immediately was horrified by this, he realized that something awful was going to happened. He rushed home to his hotel where he got the news that his closest friend (inaudible 17:33) had just died ad Picasso says he doesn't know why but he sat down in front of the mirror in the hotel bathroom and did this and another self-portrait in which his grief is observed in a very strange spirit of detachment and this drawing he recently gave to Jacqueline his wife and it's a drawing which she treasures very much and never again after this did he do a literal self-portrait. Almost all his subsequent references in Picasso's art to himself are in the form allegory.
For example this very touching painting called the Minotaur Moves House which is on the left which dates from April 1936 when after years of domestic strife his wife finally refused him a divorce and lay claim to half his property and Picasso I need hardly add is identified with the Minotaur while the agonized mare dropping her foal on the right on the cart is a reference to the fact that his mistress Marie Therese Walter had just produced a child and I think another more recent allegory which you all probably know are the so called veer of drawings which Picasso executed in the winter of '53, '54 after Francoise Gilot walked out on him.
And at first site these are playful masquerades but when you really go into them you see that they are very bitter comments on the dilemma of an old man in love with a much younger woman. And many of the figures in these drawings wear masks and I think this is significant, it goes back to what I was talking about before, an old man for instance can be seen chuckling behind the mask of a young girl while the young girl is disguised as an old (inaudible 19:20).
Now so much for the tricks that Picasso plays with his own identity, now let's see how he approaches other people. His portraits fall conveniently into successive groups, the earliest of these is the series of family portraits, only one of his mother oddly enough, he was very fond of her but a great many of his sister Lola and of his father. But these are not really of any great interest so I won�t bother to go into these. I'd rather go onto the more mature work. The next ones, the next group of portraits are the charcoal drawings (inaudible 20:07) that he did of his Barcelona cronies around 1898, '99 and these don't raise any particularly interesting stylistic or other problems but I will just throw one or two on the screen. They reflect what is interesting about the mirror. They reflect the influence of the very meretricious local painter called Casas whose work you see on the right there. Casas was the most successful Barcelona painter of his time, he'd been to Paris and he'd developed a very flashy style. And Picasso infinitely young and less well known, amused himself by showing Barcelona that he could beat Casas at his own game.
By the way the man on the right is Miguel Utrillo the would be father of Utrillo the painter and on the left, the top hated gentlemen is an editor called Soler who edited a paper with Picasso at the time. If you go to the Barcelona museum, it's full of portraits of these painters of one another, they seem to spend their time doing nothing else and they really aren't particularly interesting so I think we'll move on to the next period in Picasso's art. Now one of the finest examples of Picasso's Casas like portraits is this one on the left and it's a drawing of his great friend Angel Fernandez de Soto and I put this in the screen not to make any stylistic point but to show how Picasso would do a literal portrait of one of his friends and then depict him in some kind of disguise. De Soto could hardly have been less like the champagne swilling gentlemen in a white tie, on the right he was an almost penniless ne'er do well and he would occasionally earn some money by walking on in musical comedies in Barcelona and according to Picasso he never earned a tailcoat and certainly never took a girl to a smart restaurant and probably never drank champagne in his life. I felt impelled Picasso confessed to me, to improve de Soto's circumstances for him
And this of course is exactly what Picasso did for himself in some of the self-portraits and we'll see him going on doing the same thing. Now we find a similar phenomenon in two portraits of Picasso's other great friend of the period, Jaime Sabartes who is still his secretary, although he's retired and a very close friend. In the drawing of 1900 on the right, we see Sabartes as he was dry, bespectacled struggling poet and in the painting on the left, done a year later in Paris, inspired by Picasso's memory, it sees Sabartes all alone in a Paris cafe peering (inaudible 23:05) at some friend might or might not come in. Picasso with his usual kindness decided to transform his rather homely looking friend into the image of a romantic young poet and it's not a characterization to be taking serious, Sabartes to this day could hardly be less of a romantic poet or a soulful character but it's interesting. It bears at this point I've been making and it shows also Sabartes in the first of his disguises.
Sabartes has suffered more than anybody else from Picasso's predilection for disguises and he himself owns a collection of portraits in which he is metamorphosed into a Spanish Grande at the Court of Philip II, into an early aviator, a Franciscan Monk, a horned and pipe playing Hawthorne and a cigar smoking bullfighter and I'm afraid to say that Picasso delights in showing his friends a series of quite un-publishable drawings in which Sabartes is depicted in rather lazy circumstances.
But let's go back to 1901 when Picasso searched for a style which had already taken him twice to Paris, was resulting in a series of violent stylistic oscillations. So much so that when his first show took place in Paris in the summer of 1901, Picasso was criticized for being too eclectic for imitating (name 24:30) and Van Gough. And there was some justice in these accusations is born out by the portrait on the left of a Spanish friend of his (name 24:42) which is obviously inspired by one of the Lautrec portraits of (French 24:46) the flattening of the forms, the way the image is outlined in the dark line and the lettering and everything is clearly derived from Lautrec. And the only result of this exhibition, really, the positive result was that he met the gentlemen on the right, an important critic called Gustav (name 25:12) who commissioned him, gave him one of his first important commissions to illustrate a book in which holds all the personalities of Paris were to be portrayed, mostly they were to be actresses and attractive courtesans and so forth.
Now, no writer on Picasso so far as I know has referred to this project which -- didn't appear but a great many drawings were done for it. And it's interesting because it brought Picasso into contact with a rather glittering world, almost boasting world and he suddenly met a whole lot of people who up to then had been completely outside his can. And in the person of the sitter on the right, he met really whom you probably will all recognize, it is of course a portrait of Lautrec's almost favorite model, Jane Avril it's an unpublished portrait and 2 others he did of Jane Avril and I think it's an interesting link between Lautrec and Picasso. I've not be able to trace the -- Picasso forgot who the girl is on the left. He seems to remember that she was a minor musical comedy actress but his name has escaped her.
Picasso became very friendly with Jane Avril and she took him around quite a bit and temporarily his poverty was enlightened by this strange woman. Between 1901 and 1904, that's to say during the blue period, Picasso drew a number of portraits but once again I'm not going to dwell on them because they don't present any of the problems which I really want to discuss tonight. Most of them were either done at the behest of friends who wanted a record of themselves or their wives or mistresses or like the series of portratis of the Soler Family later done in exchange for clothes or other commodities. Soler was Picasso's tailor and he paid with the whole series of the Mother, the Father, the children and the family group in exchange for clothes and I frankly find that the blue period portraits are often more attractive than the (inaudible 27:23) pictures because they give the artist fewer opportunities for indulging in the self-pity and sentiment that mark so much of Picasso's work of this period. It wasn't really until 1904 when Picasso became permanently to stay in Paris with Fernande Olivier that a patent really establishes itself in Picasso's approach to portraiture and this patent has repeated itself with slight variations in all subsequent periods in Picasso's life. I would like to go into this now the important thing to remember about this patent is that it reflects the patent of Picasso's marital life. Each time that Picasso embarks on a new relationship he does a series of portraits in which he brings to light certain hidden aspects of the appearance of character of a wife or a mistress. Imperceptibly the woman herself changes and adopts the new identity that Picasso has invented for her.
And a further stage in this process comes when Picasso starts seeing other people in terms of his beloved or paradoxically sees his beloved in terms of other people and this patent of events has been more noticeably in the past 30 years than it was in the earlier part of Picasso's life. All the same we should bear it in mind when we look at portraits of Fernande Olivier. Now the portrait on the left down in the winter of 1905 '06 is a fairly literal portrait of Fernande as she was. She was a handsome robust pretty bourgeoisie with a mass of auburn hair. And in the drawing at the right, down only a few months later, after Picasso had been looking at Egyptian art in the Louvre and I suspect that idea in sculpture (inaudible 29:07) Picasso has subtly turned fear not into an exotic (inaudible 29:13) character with a cat like air of mystery. And now let's see what happens when Picasso portrays other people at this time. Now the portrait on the left which you all know is in this museum, portrait of Gertrude Stein's nephew Allen who is 11 years old at the time, also dates from the early part of 1905 but I'm sure you'll agree that the cat like expression and the curiously in determinant age and sex of the face indicates that the image of the (inaudible 29:40) came between the artist and his sitter and the (inaudible 29:44) on the right which was done in Gosol in the Pyrenees is not the case in point. It's one of a series that Picasso did of local peasant girls and the features according to the artist, something of a generalization, there are overturns taken from Al Greco, some of whose work Picasso had recently seen again in Spain but once again he's rendered his subject in terms of (inaudible 30:08) and other similar heads of peasant girls or generalized peasant girls most specifically in his accomplice's image. Now before leaving Gosol Picasso had embarked on probably the greatest portrait he ever did.
The portrait of Gertrude Stein which you see on the left but as most of you all remember the artist temporarily abandoned this portrait. He- I think he - as she sat for him some 80 times and because of his inability I suspect to reconcile Gertrude Stein's hieratic features with the much gentler features and the ideal beauty he brought out in (inaudible 30:44) he simply couldn't resolve it and so he went off for the summer and it was only when the artist returned to Paris in the fall of 1906 that he was able to finish the picture from memory in a few hours. And the influence of primitive Iberian sculpture which he'd been seeing in Spain obviously played a certain role in these. But we mustn't forget that while he was at Gosol that summer he'd executed a series of portraits of an old smuggler whom you see here on the right and these as Picasso himself had mixed helped him to find a formula for the Gertrude Stein portrait. Indeed there's a small bronzed head which is halfway between Gertrude Stein and the smuggler it has. The same kind of letter box (inaudible 31:29) and the (inaudible 31:31) which is the same in both cases. And again we find Gertrude Stein making herself felt in quite a few of the portraits of Fernande Olivier and this portrait on the right of Fernande Olivier (inaudible 31:50) done two years later in Museum of Modern Art is a case in point and I think we find the influence of the Gertrude Stein painting on quite a few of the early cubist heads of (inaudible 32:02).
Now portrait painting was really hardly compatible with the new approach to Victorian problems which Picasso had adopted. Hence there are virtually no negro period portraits; this portrait on the left of Mark (inaudible 32:18) was an exception. There was also a self-portrait but there's also a portrait of Van Dammen but these are very exceptional. And then when we come to Cubism, there are the three great portraits of Soler, Kahnweiler and Uda, which I would like to spend a long time discussing but I simply can't because we have to get on to other things. There is also a so-called portrait of Braque, I say so-called, because Braque never sat for it and claims that it never remotely resembled him. And the only thing about it was that he used to wear a funny conical sugar loaf hat like if we go in the so-called portrait of Braque. And when Picasso when or when Fernande Olivier left Picasso he around 1911 he abandoned portraiture for five years. His next mistress, Marcelle Humbert or Eva as he pre-christened her she lived with the artist from 1910 until her early death in 1915. She was unique in being the only one of the artists close companions of whom no portrait was ever done. That by the way on the left is another is one of the (inaudible 33:27) cubists portraits, that's Uda which belonged to Roland Penrose and last week was sold to an American collector, Mr. Pulitzer Vincent Lewis and on the right you'll see the great portrait of Kahnweiler which is in the Art Institute in Chicago.
But when he when Eva came into his life he gave up portraiture and his early references to Eva at all were (inaudible 33:52) which he would write on quite a few of his compositions as here or (inaudible 33:56) Eva and these irrelevant phrases were added as a tribute to her charm. She was a very pretty girl and it's very sad that there are no portraits of her. I love her very much Picasso wrote to Kahnweiler and I shall write her name on my pictures but that's all he did. Picasso's sudden adoption in 1915 of an (inaudible 34:19) like style must be seen not only as a return to representationalism but also as a return to portraiture, the reasons for this about face that caused such consternation around Cubist (inaudible 34:30) are not hard to discover. Picasso himself is said I wanted to show that I could draw like anybody else but what in fact he wanted to do was to proof that he could draw better than anyone else. And I think that he wanted to give an airing to the academic virtuoso who lurks within him. And a further reason I'm certain was a need to resume doing portraits of his friends and this is a permanent need with Picasso.
His first subjects were two dealers, (inaudible 34:59) had his portrait drawing in the Metropolitan and the one on the left of (inaudible 35:03) Rosenberg, the brother of Alexander Rosenberg, and the of Paul Rosenberg and then two poets. Here's a poet now on the right, a drawing of 1915, the one was another drawing of (inaudible 35:14). Now the (inaudible 35:16) now as I said dates from 1915, the year that Picasso resumed his pre-cubist habit of doing portraits of the girl or girls with whom he formed an attachment. By 1916, '17 Picasso says he was involved with three different girls, one who had an Italian name which he's completely forgotten who was the subject of numerous drawings none of which have come to light. Another was called (inaudible 35:41) and she was the model for an engraving which we know but nothing else is known about her and the third and most important was this girl on the left, Gaby Lespinasse who's delicate looks inspired a whole series of drawings which have only recently come to light and hardly any of which have so far been published. And to judge by the passionate inscriptions which Picasso added to these drawings he was very much in love with her for a year or two and at last these inscriptions were clumsily erased by the owner before she sold them. And these portraits are curious because they bespeak a sentimental tenderness which is unusual in Picasso's work and no less unusual is the style which is not so much (inaudible 36:23) as reminiscent of Renoirs works of the 1880s, there's a sort of class (inaudible 36:28) pictures he did and also rather reminiscent of Greek mirror backs.
The relationship with Gaby Lespinasse came to an end in 1917 when (inaudible 36:39) whom we see here portrayed on the right persuaded Picasso to go to Italy to get (inaudible 36:44) and work with De Aguilar's Ballet Russe. Now poets have always played a key role in Picasso's life, so much so that (inaudible 36:55) once told me that there have always been four determining factors at any given period in Picasso's life, a woman with whom he's in love, the poet who serves as a catalyst, the circle of friends who provide the stimulus and affection on which he thrives and the dog which is his inseparable companion and which as I should show in due course sometimes exerts a stylistic influence. Now sometimes these factors overlap but usually when the wife or the mistress changes everything else changes accordingly and (inaudible 37:28) is of course the poet we associate with Picasso's early blue period work, (inaudible 37:34) with the cubist period, (inaudible 37:36) with a neoclassic period, and again with the years from 1952 to '62 and then the surrealist poets with the late '20s and then (inaudible 37:45) with the '30s and '40s and this is very important to remember this thing of this connection between the poet and Picasso's work. Certainly the catalytic effect of (inaudible 37:54) was considerable. He was responsible for Picasso's association with the Russian Ballet which resulted not only in a series of magnificent decor but also in the artist's marriage to (inaudible 38:08) dancers of Olga Khokhlova and then Picasso also actively encouraged Picasso's neoclassic tendencies. And was rarely instrumental in persuading Picasso to forsake bohemia for the north worldly Parisian society which revolved around hostesses like (inaudible 38:28), Madame (name 38:30) they were all collectors and around this character we see on the right who was the Count (name 38:35) who became a very close friend of Picassos and launched him in society and really completely transformed his social life, not necessarily for the better. These changes in Picasso's social and marital status are reflected in the portraits which he did at the time especially in the polished and mannered but incisive drawings which he did of various personalities associated with the Russian Ballet. On the left you'll see (inaudible 39:03) and on the right a drawing done after a photograph of De Aguiliar standing in the top hat and his lawyer (inaudible 39:10) who is seated and he did a whole lot of other drawings of Parisian musicians and writers, (inaudible 39:19) and so on.
But as usual Picasso's most important portraits are the ones of the women loved and this was now his wife, his first wife, Olga. And just as he'd done with Fernande because it suits his style, his subject, and the literal representations which he did when first met Olga in 1917, gradually give way to a more stylized approach in keeping with her looks and her personality. And on the whole Picasso's portraits of this period are highly representational like the one on the right but occasionally he tries a portrait of his wife in the synthetic cubist style as you see on the left but this is somewhat exceptional and not to my mind all together satisfactory but it's interesting showing the same pose or more or less the same pose treated in two totally different ways.
The literal those who knew Olga Picasso at the time agreed that she was very beautiful but conventional to the point of being characterless. And I think this much emerges in most of her portraits which Picasso did of her after their marriage but then at best they're redeemed by a tenderness that the artist has breathed into them but one often feels that Picasso was baffled by the insipidness of his wife's character and she comes across as little more than a bland classic mask and the same is often true of the portrait drawings that he did of other girls of the period and even when Olga gave birth to a son an event which delighted Picasso, the artist celebrated the occasion in a series of monumental classical but quite impersonal (inaudible 40:56) and indeed so impersonal are some of the paintings of this neoclassic period that one can't tell whether their portraits of Olga or whether their portraits of some ideal beauty greatly inspired by Olga. I think the portrait on the right is a portrait of his Olga and on the left is a sort of bland character who he's invented.
Now Clive Bell the art critic who did (inaudible 41:21) or the preface to the (inaudible 41:22) pictures here, was a big friend of both the Picasso's at this period and he gave me an account of their married life in which I'd like to quote because I think it explains the (inaudible 41:34) of some of these portraits. Olga was a nice common place Russian General's daughter. When she married she expected life to be very much as it was before 1914. Small house or flat and several neat servants who gave little dinner parties for which of course you dressed. And you also went out to little dinner parties and the big dinner parties were set in such disperse nights and you only knew nice people. Now for some years Clive Bell said some years Picasso tried to conform and tried to fit into Olga's way of life. But because she was stupid it took her a long time to realize that the attempt was making him miserable and furious and I can apply a post-script to this. Picasso recently told me that at this period he wanted to put a notice on his -the door of his studio saying (inaudible 42:19) and gentlemen. Now when it came Picasso's reaction against his wife's conformism was violent. First signs of (inaudible 42:30) appear in that great monumental composition (inaudible 42:32) of 1925 a work that announces a new so-called convulsive (inaudible 42:39) realists invented that word. Convulsive about Picasso's work of the period, development in Picasso's art, neoclassicism and the style of portraiture that went with it were soon jettisoned and there were no further references to Olga Picasso for another 10 years or so.
That is to say not until a couple finalists lit up in 1935, now the construct between the first and last portraits of Olga is a chastening one. ON the right we see how Olga appeared to be Picasso when he fell in love with her in 1917 and on the left we see how he saw her in 1935, a nagging guilt making specter whose approachful eyes look as if they'd been burnt into her paper white face and here is another picture of Olga painted in 1935, what seems to be especially diabolical about these pictures which I don't think have been recognized and has officially portraits of Olga but Picasso assures me that they are, what is diabolical is the way that Olga's serene melancholy expression which he rendered so affectionately in the early years of their marriage is transformed into a hideous but recognizable grimace and not the least fascinating about Picassos portraits is that they chart their decline and fall as well the golden years of the artists success and finances.
Now one of the main causes of the disintegration of the Picasso's marriage was his involvement with Marie-Therese Walter, a girl who is part French and part Scandinavian whom he met in 1927 and this date by the way is nearly always given wrong. For some reason everybody seems to think that he didn't meet her until 1930, he did in fact meet her in much before and here on the left the lithograph of Marie-Therese which I put on the screen because it shows her literally as she was. She's a very pretty voluptuous blond who didn't have much individuality but she was in every respect the reverse of Olga. She was bohemian, undemanding and very feminine and Marie-Therese spent much of her time aimlessly listening to the radio, dosing and lying on the beach or swimming en hence the numerous drawings of the period of two girls. She had a sister from figures in these drawings of course swimming or lying around on the beach and I think there was a painting which is on loan at the moment to the museum which shows Marie-Therese and her sister sitting at a table writing a letter and above all what Picasso brought out in Marie-Therese was her languish eroticism. We see on the right the picture in the red which belongs in the Victor (name 45:26) collection in New York where she's transformed into a sort of sublime May West monumental (inaudible 45:36) and sometimes he transforms her into a sort of serene classical deity crowned with a wreath. There's other times he concentrates on her more sculptural possibilities as in the right hand throughout the whole series of her. This is one of the more classical of them but the rest is really poke fun at classical sculpture and he did all kinds of- he did paintings, sculptures, drawings, an enormous amount of (inaudible 46:07) in the late '20s, early '30s.
Now if it hadn't been for Picasso's work or Olga's refusal to allow him a divorce because he would have married Marie-Therese in 1935 or 1936. He was the father of her daughter Maya born in '35 and he found her free and easy ways very much to his taste. But in 1936 the further obstacle arose through (inaudible 46:34) the poet Picasso met and fell in love with another young girl Dora Maar whom we see on the left. There's a portrait of her done in 1937 soon after he met her and she was as unlike Marie-Therese as Marie-Therese was unlike Olga. She was born Dora Markovich and was the daughter of a successful Yugoslav architect and she was brought up in the Argentine and in France and she was an intellectual, very sophisticated, somewhat neurotic girl who'd worked as a painter, she was a rather good painter and photographer and she was a close friend of the surrealists and Dora's strength, her personality and her intelligence was something that Picasso wasn't used to in his mistresses but while it challenged him it also appealed to him and he also enjoyed her (inaudible 47:22) smartness and her dark radiant looks.
And for the first time we get a great deal of details of fashion, of makeup, heavy eye makeup, heavy lip stick, scaporelli hats and so on. I mean she's used as like a parody of a fashion plate. And you can chart this development of fashion through Dora's portraits. Within a few days of their meeting Picasso did some drawings of her and as usual he soon arrived at an extraordinary deep and subtle characterization of his subject and he devised an expressive new idiom which matches it. Dora Maar says it was like having someone reveal to you the truth about yourself for the first time. By the time their relationship came to an end 18 years later, Picasso must have done well over 500 portraits of Dora Mar in various media. When I think of it this is one of the most extraordinary feet's in the whole history of portraiture as well as one of Picasso's most original and impressive achievements.
And the artist put his model through a more ruthless pictorial analysis than any other artists subject that hath suffer and true Dora Maar seldom had to sit for him as poor Madame Cezanne had to do for her husband but she had to stand by while he dissected each of her features, her expressions, her body, her character, and at the same time Picasso continued to paint portraits of Marie-Therese but the image of his new love came between him and his old favorite and the portraits are often a very curious mixture of the two women in the portrait on the left the model is a bit more like Marie-Therese on the left and in turn with her blonde hair and then turns to Dora Maar on the right and she's a - does a blend of the two women. It must be terrible Picasso once said to me for a girl to see in my picture that she is being supplanted and terribly indeed but Picasso was never able to prevent the dilemmas of his life from invading his work.
Fortunately Picasso's singular approach to portraiture can also work in reverse. Other paintings of his in which the new mistress is seen in terms of her predecessor, I think this emerges in these portraits not showing on the right the top three and the two next on the left are all of Dora Maar and the other ones are all of Marie-Therese but the Dora Maar, the very influence of Marie-Therese and vice a versa you get this extraordinariness of the super imposition of the features of the other woman and it goes both ways. We shouldn't however conclude that the number of people present in any one of Picasso's portraits is limited to two. On a sum of (inaudible 50:12) in the south of France in '37 and '38 he was accompanied not only by Dora Maar but by (inaudible 50:18) the poet. And (inaudible 50:20) wife, he also saw a lot of (inaudible 50:23) the American photographer and the three Spanish sisters who helped run the hotel where he stayed and Picasso did separate portraits of all these people. He also did one I can only describe as composite portraits. One's in which the features of three or even four people blend into a single image and the one on the left is a case in point it's a bit of (inaudible 50:45) bit of Lee Miller, a bit of Dora, a bit of one of the Spanish girls who subsequently became his housekeeper in Paris and rather you can pick out at least four people in that one picture.
And in other works of the same summer he cast arbitrary changes in the sex of his friends (inaudible 51:07) for instance is given a quiff and transformed into a girl from (inaudible 51:11) and also into a province style peasant woman who is suckling a kitten. This is under the influence of surrealism. At one more bazar element must be taken into account if we want fully to understand the pictures of this period. Picasso who has a passion for animals and who had recently acquired an Afghan dog called Kasbeck he proceeds deliberately and to some extent maliciously to grant the elongated muscle and floppy ears of the afghan dog on to Dora Maar as you see here on the right, bits of 1938. And in many other works at the period the more grotesque or distorted Dora Maars you see the same thing and when asked about it. Picasso says simply that this is a comment on the animal nature of women.
And while on the subject of dogs it's perhaps worth noting that Picasso's favorite Airedale, Elf, was the inspiration of several of the drawings and paintings of bulless heads. And whether portraying human beings or animals the artists approach always seems to be the same. Now I don't want to suggest that all the portraits of the period of this period are competent ones on the contrary the majority of them point up the contrast between the two girls and Picasso's life at the time. For example, these two works which were both done on the same day, January 21st, 1939. The Dora Maar on the left is in the (inaudible 52:39) collection in New York and the one of Marie-Therese on the right still belongs to Picasso. In both cases the composition is more or less the same, you see the studio window in the background but a sharp stylistic distinction has been made between the personalities and the looks of the two sitters and the contrast is even more marked if we take two characteristic portraits of the period of the two women and the Marie-Therese on the left which belongs to Picasso dates from January 7th, 1939 and the Dora Maar from April 1st of the same year. So there's only a few months between them. But despite the distortions Marie-Therese appears as an languorous and sensuous as ever and incidentally don't miss the hand held up to her face which is just a quotation from (inaudible 53:28) portrait of Madame (name 53:30) which in turn is a quotation from a (inaudible 53:33) fresco in a museum in Naples.
The Dora Maar on the right is much more twisted and tragic in conception and I think it reflects Dora Maar's angst with nature as well as the artist's premonitions of war. Picasso himself has said I haven't painted the wall because I'm not the kind of painter who goes out to like a photographer for something to depict but I've no doubt the war is in these paintings, later perhaps historians will show that my style changed under the wars influence, myself I do not know. And certainly, heads of Dora Maar done during the war which carry on the weeping heads of (inaudible 54:13) which the old Dora Maar inspired seem to be pre-text for an expression of Picasso's disquiet, his disgust and his despair and what's so great is the variety and the quantity of Picasso's Dora Maar portraits and so numerous problems, stylistic, psychological, artistic, iconographical and so on but they raised that I can't begin to do just to them. One of the chief complications is that although we know the exact date of almost all of them, Picasso's dated them on the back or (inaudible 54:45) on the front they follow no consistent sequence. The artist appears to tackle his subject from all sides at once and the reason according to Dora Maar is that Picasso's approach was completely subjective and the style of the portrait or still life for that matter landscape was dictated by his mood or by accidents of everyday life and sometimes a particular theme or composition will obsess Picasso for a week or more but mostly we find the classical or naturalistic head done at more or less the same time as paintings in which the features reassemble in the most arbitrary way.
At the same time he reverted to his
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Publisher (Electronic Version)

Archives and Manuscripts Collections, The Baltimore Museum of Art;

Holding Institution

Baltimore Museum of Art;

Date Original

1967-05-16

Date Digital

2011

Type

Sound;

Format

Digital reproduction of one sound tape reel, 55 minutes, 25 seconds

Source

Audiovisual Collection, AV.RR.14.A

Coverage (Time Period)

1961-1970;

Rights

Permission to reproduce this item is required and may be subject to copyright, fees, and other legal restrictions. For more information, please contact: E. Kirkbride Miller Art Research Library, Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, (443) 573-1778, bmalibrary@artbma.org